my views on the local news in Minnesota

June 2008

June 22, 2008

So picture a fine summer day, bicycling or walking and enjoying nature, when all of a sudden out of the blue, nature attacks you. And here you thought that if you stayed ecologically correct, abstaining from internal combustion engines, you would partake of the nirvana of the Garden of Eden. Ouch.

When you don't have the facts on your side, resort to name calling
and if you REALLY don't have the facts on your side, make sure you use
a tone of total outrage. From the Guardian:

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate
scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil
fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and
nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming
in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between
smoking and cancer.

First of all, who says that this guy is "one of the world's leading climate scientists?" According to wikipedia, he's "Al Gore's science advisor." Here's more background on him.

June 20, 2008

"I woke up to them pounding on the wall with flashlights
in my face," Troy said. "(They said) 'Lakeville police!' and that's
when I got up and said, 'What's going on?'"

This is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, when they came to get you in
the middle of the night. Except in this case the police say they're
just doing this as a public service.

Lakeville police chief Tom Vonhof defended the 3:00 a.m. intrusion:

"They had to check from a health and welfare point check
and make sure those kids were okay," said Lakeville Police Chief Tom
Vonhof.

It's always about the kids, isn't it? Nothing in the coverage I've
read describes any suspicious activity whatsoever. The ONLY reason
given for the police entering this family's home in the middle of the
night and shining their flashlights in the face of the homeowner was
that the home was unsecured.

Are Lakeville residents to expect similar intrusions if they forget
to lock the door? If the bad guys don't take advantage of the open
garage door, the cops will give you an unpleasant awakening in the
middle of the night.

This is the kind of story that makes people wonder, yet again, why criminals have more rights than the rest of us.

I wonder what might have happened if this homeowner had a firearm near his bed.

June 19, 2008

Canadian court has lifted a 12-year-old girl's
grounding, overturning her father's punishment for disobeying his
orders to stay off the Internet, his lawyer said Wednesday.

This is one of those stories that left me with my mouth open,
totally speechless at this unbelievable abuse of governmental power
used to mess up an ordinary family. But it seems Canadians don't have
some of the most basic human rights we take for granted here.

What does something like this do to the Canadian family? By undermining
parental authority, it deprives children of the stability that they so
desperately need. It is inconceivable that a judge is allowed to second
guess parental grounding decisions on the flimsy basis that she thinks
the parent was too strict. Without predictable boundaries set by adults
who love their children, children are left adrift in a sea of
permissiveness and enter adulthood ill-prepared to succeed.

June 14, 2008

This last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations
similar to those issued under the Clinton administration setting forth
very detailed restrictions on the manner in which oil companies may
explore for oil and natural gas in the Chukchi Sea in Alaska.

This may not sound like news, but an AP report has spun it into yet
another one-sided, exaggerated report designed to pound it into all of
us that the Bush Administration is an evil, anti-polar bear patsy in
the service of big oil.

Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species
because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil
companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit
of oil and natural gas.

The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing
legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and
gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if "small
numbers" of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by
their activities over the next five years.

Environmentalists said the new regulations give oil companies a blank check to harass the polar bear.

Of course, that's not what the regulations say. They go on and on
and on in an effort to protect, in every possible way, the polar bears
and walruses that might be in the area of oil and gas exploration.

I don't think the AP writer read those regulations. They are very
long and involved and would undoubtedly bore the pants off most people.

The 193 pages of regulations
are similar to those previously in effect for the Beaufort Sea from
1993, when Clinton was president, through the present. They allow
"nonlethal, incidental, unintentional" actions. They contain:

detailed requirements directing the oil company to monitor the
polar bears and walruses, and provide the Fish and Wildlife Service
with information about the seasonal distributions of the mammals;

minutely detailed "mitigation measures" directing the oil companies
to power down or shut down seismic surveying activities under certain
circumstances; and

Although concentrations of walruses in open water
environments are expected to be low, groups of foraging or migrating
animals transiting through the area may be encountered. Adaptive
mitigation measures based upon real time monitoring information will be
implemented to mitigate potential impacts to walrus groups feeding in
offshore locations and ensure that these impacts are limited to small
numbers of animals. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)
identified that Level B harassment of marine mammals begins at 160–dB
re 1 µPa. The Service concurs with this determination and believes its
use is applicable to walrus aggregations. For that reason, whenever an
aggregation of 12 or more walruses are detected within an acoustically
verified 160–dB re 1 µPa disturbance zone ahead of or perpendicular to
the seismic vessel track, the Service will require the operator to
immediately power down the seismic airgun array and/or other acoustic
sources to ensure sound pressure levels at the shortest distance to the
aggregation do not exceed 160–dB re 1 µPa. The operator will not be
allowed to proceed with powering up the seismic airgun array until it
can be established that there are no walrus aggregations within the
160–dB zone based upon ship course, direction, and distance from last
sighting.

Doesn't sound like a "blank check" to me. If you are in doubt, please feel free to read the other 192 pages.

June 12, 2008

This came in the mail today, addressed to my mother, who just celebrated her 89th birthday and hasn't owned or driven an automobile in a few years:

"FINAL NOTICE" will get the attention of most people, especially the elderly who may be worried about missing required payments on debts. Especially if they've noticed that their memory isn't what it used to be.

The "FINAL WARRANTY NOTICE," along with the statement that the 20% discount will expire within 48 hours, will make the recipient think that his/her warranty is about to expire, but s/he can make everything all better just by calling the toll free number.

I used to work at national dealers warranties. the company motto,
''hang up or buy.'' Welcome to the world of the hard sale. the world of
not caring about what you are selling. the first thing we were taught
in training... how to lie. here is the script of what the employee is
supposed to tell you. and how they are supposed to lie.

Today's article by Terence Jeffrey
at CNSNews.com illuminates the connection between the automobile and
freedom, and the threat to freedom embodied in the green command that
we switch from private automobiles to public transit:

No device is more in keeping with the American spirit
than the automobile. Privately owned cars and trucks allow us to go
where we want, when want. They are freedom machines.

Still, some liberals would like to use government to force Americans out of their cars.

They believe in socialized transportation, not free-market transportation.

In a free-market transportation system, a person purchases his own
vehicle with his own money, buys his own gas with his own money and can
drive his vehicle anywhere there is a road -- and, if he has the right
kind of vehicle, some places where there are no roads.

Admittedly, the roads generally are constructed by government,
albeit with funds extracted from the earnings and gasoline purchases of
drivers.

In a socialist transportation system, the government takes the
taxpayers' money and purchases vehicles -- often buses or trains -- for
itself or a government-funded agency. Where and when these vehicles go
is determined by the government.

In a free-market transportation system, a person travels solely in
the company of people with whom he has freely chosen to travel. In a
socialist transportation system, a person may be compelled to travel in
the company of people he does not know and who could even be a danger
to him.

I know a number of small business owners whose business depends on
being able to get from point A to point B, hauling heavy equipment,
materials and supplies, and neither point A nor point B are on transit
lines. Even if they were, how do you haul a skidloader or a small
tractor on the bus? How many seats would you take up with your bags of
cement, landscaping timbers, and how do you transport a load of mulch
on light rail? And what about the truckers who haul the food and
supplies to our grocery stores, home improvement stores, and all of the
great variety of retail outlets that serve our needs on a daily basis?

Small business drives our economy, according to the SBA,
because it provides jobs for over half of the nation's private
workforce. Is it possible that the all-knowing elitists who want to
dictate how we live our lives have overlooked these questions? Would
they like to dictate what jobs these entrepreneurs and their
employees should take so that they would not need their own private vehicles?

Would they like to replace the astounding creativity that
entrepreneurs have used to increase the standard of living of us all
with the subservience of drones that simply do what they are ordered to
do?

Jeffrey puts it succinctly:

Artificially suppressing the oil supply is the most
significant method government is using today to move people from a free
market transportation system into a socialized transportation system.

And of course it's not the government alone that's doing this. I read today at foxnews.com that environmental groups recently succeeded in blocking yet another refinery expansion:

Four-plus-dollar gasoline is forcing Americans to
realize that we need increased domestic oil production to meet our
ever-growing demand for affordable fuel. But even if the greens lose
the political battle over drilling offshore and in places like the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they nevertheless are way ahead of the
game as they implement a back-up plan to make sure that not a drop of
that oil ever eases our gasoline crunch.

The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC,
successfully pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to
block ConocoPhillips’ expansion of its Roxana, Ill., gasoline refinery,
which processes heavy crude oil from Canada, the Wall Street Journal
reported on Monday.

The project would have expanded the volume of Canadian crude
processed from 60,000 barrels per day to more than 500,000 barrels a
day by 2015. After the Illinois EPA had approved the expansion, the
green groups petitioned the federal EPA to block it, alleging
ConocoPhillips wasn’t using the best available technology for reducing
emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.

Apparently, the plant’s planned 95 percent reduction in sulfur
dioxide emissions and 25 percent reduction in nitrogen oxides wasn’t
green enough. NRDC’s opposition is quite ironic since ConocoPhillips
and the activist group actually are teammates in the global warming
game. Both belong to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition
of eco-activist groups and large companies that is lobbying for global
warming regulation.

Is any refinery going to be "green enough" to satisfy the Sierra Club?

June 09, 2008

I love this story. What do you do when people tell you that the way you've lived your life for 79 years now constitutes a nuisance?

It didn't used to be a nuisance. It used to be the way everybody did it.

Suddenly, you're not only behind the times, antiquated and weird,
you're a lawbreaker for doing the same thing that used to be done by
everyone.

This man is not impressed by indoor plumbing. He sees benefits in doing things the old way. If it ain't broke, you know . . .

He's a good example of why we came up with the word "grandfathering"
in the zoning context. And being a great-grandfather, he should have
been entitled to a double dose of grandfathering.

But public health officials in his county don't share my opinion, so they ordered this old farmer to get rid of his outhouse.

I'm guessing they didn't care whether it had a smaller carbon footprint than the modern version.

I'm glad there was a non-profit group to come to his aid and build him a new one that complied with the modern ordinances.

And I'm glad that he stood his ground, too.

When I ask myself why I feel that way, it's hard to articulate the
basis for my thoughts. I admire those who think for themselves and
refuse to bow to the latest tidbit of conventional so-called wisdom. So
often we see people who give over the task of thinking to others,
accepting whatever the latest bromide is for this or for that.

This man grew up before we started hearing as part of the 10 o'clock
news that we should stick a thermometer in our hamburgers before we
take them off the grill. He no doubt grew up eating bacon and eggs, and
put butter on his toast.

I prize the human spirits that have learned to make their way
through their lives on their own wits, sinking or swimming, trusting
only in those who have earned their trust, and loathe to give away to
others the power to control their lives.

My father was like that. He was a self-made man. He gave up
outhouses in his youth, but never gave up the right to think for
himself.